


Jammed

by Corrosion



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! - All Media Types
Genre: Consentacles, Crack, Established Relationship, M/M, Multi, Other, Post-Canon, Revival Jam is Malik's Ka, inappropriate use of shadow magic, one short discussion of necrophilia in a later chapter, which is more-or-less his soul
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-26
Updated: 2018-11-26
Packaged: 2019-08-29 15:19:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16746472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Corrosion/pseuds/Corrosion
Summary: When Malik finally gets around to summoning his Ka, he finds it insultingly easy.Unfortunately, un-summoning his Ka is far more difficult.





	Jammed

**Author's Note:**

> A chapter will be posted every week. Well, maybe. 
> 
> The "one short discussion of necrophilia in a later chapter" tag refers to a hypothetical situation with a Zombie-type Ka.
> 
> Yami Malik is named "Amir" in this fic. He will show up later. 
> 
> There might be gaps between italicized words and punctuation marks; I don't know if this is a problem specifically from copy+pasting the fic from Google Docs or what.

Malik looked back and forth between his notes and the summoning circle he had drawn on the white tile floor of his penthouse’s master bathroom. If everything went well, then his Ka would be summoned into the material plane by the end of the day. The summoning circle was somewhat more of a summoning oval, but expecting people to be able to draw a perfect circle was unreasonable, he thought.

 

“You’re over-complicating things.” Bakura sat on the edge of the bathtub, inspecting his fingernails for imaginary dust. Despite being in his old body, he was not stewing in his old filth: even had he been summoned in his true old condition (dirty), Malik would have gotten a hose and cleaned him that way.

 

There was a precedent for Bakura intentionally screwing things up, but Malik was fairly certain that he was telling the truth this time; there was no reason for him to put both himself and his partner in unreasonable danger. On the other hand, Bakura’s idea of what constituted “unreasonable danger” was often not what anyone else would consider unreasonable. Therein lay the problem. The probability of the whole ritual screwing up and creating a catastrophe was an uncomfortable and indeterminate nonzero value, but Bakura treated any probability less than 0.5 as if it did not exist.

 

If the ancient texts were less concerned with appearing official and important, and more concerned with actually informing the reader, then Malik wouldn’t have had to consult Bakura. “It— I don’t _not_ trust you,” he said, “but I want to be able to use the bathtub after this. It has jets. You _like_ the jets.” After Bakura had found out about hot tubs and their jets, he had been adamant that Malik’s next apartment have a bathtub with jets. Malik had thought the whole thing silly right up until he discovered bubble bath.

 

Bakura snorted, didn’t even look up from his nails, and said, “If your Ka destroys your apartment, then it’s your fault. Just because Mahaad did something stupid doesn’t mean that all Kas are anything more than semi-autonomous. You’ll have full control.”

 

Still skeptical, though willing to go through with it, Malik raised an eyebrow. “Full control over something how big? Even if I can control it, something like Seiyaryu would destroy the bathroom through sheer size.” However awesome having control over a dragon sounded, it would be unwieldy and impossible to hide, not least because Seiyaryu was the kind of violent pink one thinks is appealing after having stayed up three days in a row without the assistance of select substances.

 

“Do you or don’t you want to summon your Ka?” Out of boredom and frustration, Bakura raised his hand to bite his fingernails, but the moment he tasted the bitter clear nail polish Malik had painted over them, he stopped. Handing off control to Malik for the small things, to change his habits, came startlingly easy to him.

 

“I do; however, I also don’t want to destroy my entire apartment.” Well, either his apartment would be destroyed or not, so, Malik thought, the only thing left to do was summon the thing. It wasn’t as if they couldn’t complete the ritual outdoors, but the chances of people happening upon them and mistaking them for Satanists was too high; as much as Bakura liked fighting, they didn’t want to come under suspicion for ritual sacrifices. Fighting the entire police department during the horrid heat of high summer was not Malik’s idea of a good time. If Bakura wanted to incur the government’s wrath, he could do that without getting everyone else involved.

 

Malik finally closed his waterproof notebook (as it turned out, his university’s bookstore was good for more than overpriced textbooks) and stepped over to the summoning circle. He concentrated on one of the finite possibilities of the ritual, the essence of himself, crystalizing it into a not uncertain form. The world did not tilt on its axis. There were no explosions. There secrets of the mystical did not reveal themselves to him. Malik felt both cheated and a bit light-headed, as if he stood up too fast after sitting for more than five minutes.

 

That was not to say that the ritual was entirely ineffective, exactly, but effective at doing what, Malik had no idea — for, in the middle of the circle, sat what he swore was a periwinkle version of Revival Jam. It burbled at him, the darker sections of slime that resembled eyes unfocused but pointing vaguely up at the ceiling. Bakura glanced up from his hands, looked what was purportedly Malik’s Ka up and down, and promptly fell backwards into the bathtub in a fit of giggles.

 

“Oh, sure, Mr. ‘My-Ka-Can-Eat-BEWD’, yuck it up,” Malik said, and grabbed his notebook to find where he had gone wrong and fix it immediately. Yugi-tachi could never find out about his failure, lest he be showered in pink slime every single time Jounouchi remembered. His only consolation was Jounouchi’s often-faulty memory.

 

When he couldn’t find any mistake after a few minutes, Malik re-read the directions, meticulously copied in indelible ink, which offered him no advice. At the very least, whatever was in the middle of the summoning circle didn’t seem inclined to attack. Malik wasn’t like Bakura — he read instructions; however, whether or not he chose to _follow_ them was another story. This time, though, he had followed them to the letter. He looked to the purple Revival Jam and put his face in his hands. That...thing was his Ka.

 

By that time, Bakura was well on his way to choking on his own laughter, if the occasional hiccup was anything to go by. Malik thought, perhaps uncharitably, that it would serve him right if he got a bump from accidentally smacking his head on the side of the tub. “I didn’t laugh at you when you argued with the turnstile in the subway, so get your ass out of the tub and help me put this...this...this.” If he couldn’t summon anything less gobsmackingly goofy, then it was best to pretend it never happened. He’d take a lesson from cats, and resolutely groom himself after his misjudged leap into the arcane. He shook his hands at the Revival Jam in the futile hope that it would miraculously transform into something  ( _anything_ ) else.

 

“I— I— _Jam.”_ Bakura punctuated his sentence fragment with the undignified squeaks that resulted from withheld laughter.

 

“I see. My Ka has the power to rob people of the ability to speak even a single coherent sentence. How pleasant.” Malik slapped his notebook down on the vanity and stepped to smudge the edge of the summoning circle. If he broke it, would the Revival Jam return whence it came? To his consternation, the Revival Jam moved its eyespots in his general direction, and turned the line that would represent a mouth, if it were an emoji on a phone, into a frown. Malik moved his foot back and stared at the thing. It frowned harder. Malik frowned at his Ka.

 

Bakura drew himself into a sitting position, his arms shaking from the effort of not collapsing into another fit of the giggles. His knees were still hooked over the side of the tub, so he rested his chin between them. “I guess this means that we’re moving onto — _is it making a frowny face at you?”_

 

Between Bakura and his own gods-be-damned Ka, Malik wasn’t sure which one was more disappointing. Once it saw that Malik was granting it temporary reprieve from his vexation, the Revival Jam turned the full force of its frown on Bakura. “It does mean that we’re moving onto Ka dismissal,” Malik said, then tilted his head to stare into the depths of Revival Jam and continued, “and don’t think you’re blameless in this.” It surely couldn’t be _his own_ fault that his Ka was a slime. _Right?_

 

For all of his bragging about mastery over his own Ka, Bakura was currently useless. Malik stooped down to pick up his Ka in a valiant effort to ignore the fool in the bathtub and get on with his life, but he soon found that just as absurd as everything else. The Revival Jam oozed through his fingers, his grappling attempt what he would later describe as a pitiful Sisyphean struggle to firmly grasp liquid soap. A spike of fear lanced through him — any injuries a Ka sustained would be inflicted on its Ba; however, no pain resulted from grabbing globs of slime, only the overwhelming feeling that his day had, irreversibly, gone to shit.

 

Trying to lift the Revival Jam was like trying to lift an infinite cat — an exercise in futility that could only end in tears of hysteria as one came to realize that terrible truth: incomprehensibly powerful eldritch entities sat where they damn well pleased.

 

Almost an insult, Bakura’s eyes were trained on the slime as it escaped Malik’s hold. Malik glanced at Bakura without moving his head; very few things held Bakura’s attention for more than a few moments, so finding something entertaining should have been a victory. Instead, it felt like defeat.

 

To test the waters, Malik kneaded the Revival Jam, though it felt nothing like a loaf of dough. He couldn’t describe what it felt like, but he could say, with certainty, that it didn’t feel like a loaf of dough, no matter how much glutinous rice flour Bakura dumped into the mixing bowl when he turned his back. To be precise — it felt like Not-Dough.

 

Malik fought to keep a knowing smirk off his face as Bakura gave his hands (and the accursed Revival Jam) the attention they deserved. That still didn’t solve the fundamental problem, but it placated him. Somewhat. He continued to play with the Revival Jam, and, to its credit, his Ka didn’t do anything but sit there and, Malik swore, preen. It was definitely his Ka, though why it was content sitting in the middle of the bathroom floor he could only guess.

 

Bakura hauled himself up to sit on the side of the tub again, but he kept a grip on the tub in the event that he be seized with another cackling spell. “You can dismiss it if you want,” he said, “by concentrating on the feeling of not wanting it here.”

 

Malik, who had been wishing that the Revival Jam get the hell out of his bathroom since the moment it appeared, shot Bakura a glare and stopped kneading. The Revival Jam reoriented its “face” towards Malik and burbled unhappily once it realized that no one was paying any attention to it. Lifting a hand out of his depths and lightly smacking it did nothing but produce an uncomfortable noise, so Malik took his other hand out, stood up straight, and wished very, very hard that his Ka would get lost. It continued to stay put.

 

“Why are you like this?” There was no point in denying it was his Ka, given its behavior, but why did it have to look like that? “Couldn’t you have been something like Madolche Puddingcess? At least she would have a sense of...something. Style.”

 

“A Madolche Ka? Are you gonna take us to Candyland?” Regardless of his feelings about cutesy card game monster archetypes, Bakura reached out to touch the Revival Jam, and Malik moved to stop him, but the Jam had other ideas. It manipulated its body to form a tendril of slime, which it then maneuvered around Malik’s hand to touch Bakura, who didn’t hesitate to poke it.

 

Malik watched as Bakura sunk his pointer finger into the Revival Jam. It didn’t _feel_ like his soul was being prodded, but he had no frame of reference; it was as useless a comparison as saying something tasted like cardboard — most people didn’t go around eating cardboard, and cardboard wasn’t flavorless in the first place. Then there was Bakura, who had grown up without cardboard (among other things, most of which didn’t exist yet and the rest unavailable to a starving wretch), and who was determined enough to eat cardboard to prove people wrong.

 

“Feel anything?” Bakura asked as he kept his gaze on the Revival Jam, entranced by the sensation as his finger sunk in and out.

 

“Should I be?” Fuck if Malik knew anything about how controlling Kas was supposed to go. All he had to go off of were ancient texts he could barely stumble through and Bakura. Besides, Kas weren’t exactly meant to be poked without the context of an attack, or so he thought, Bakura nyooming about on Diabound notwithstanding. How, exactly, was he to ride Revival Jam?

 

Bakura stopped poking the Revival Jam, then drew his hand back and smacked the Revival Jam’s tendril. It was towards the lighter end of smacks on a Bakura-based scale, but nobody likes being smacked without warning; thus, the Revival Jam took a swing at Bakura.

 

For a single heart-stopping moment, Malik thought his Ka intended to kill Bakura, but its Ba’s predilection for disproportionate retribution didn’t carry over. The slime tendril had stopped its movement a hair’s breadth before contact; nobody so much as twitched until the Revival Jam deliberately booped Bakura on the nose and retracted its extension.

 

Bakura looked at the Revival Jam, which was now keeping its slime tentacles to itself, and said, “You should have felt that.”

 

“Felt what? Your nose?”

 

“No, the smack,” Bakura said, still not looking at Malik.

 

“It felt like when Ryou raps me on the knuckles for trying to eat his cookie dough.” His knuckles weren’t the distinctive red of when he accidentally hit the wall, but Ryou’s knuckle-whaps were more of warning knuckle-whaps than anything intended to harm. Ryou had a habit of disallowing Malik from eating anything with raw egg in it (something about his immune system being extra vulnerable to salmonella because of his limited childhood exposure to both infectious diseases and the public at large, which he considered to be the same damn thing), so he was “forced” to buy cookie-dough-flavored ice cream.  

 

Bakura squinted at Malik. “You sure? He tried to stab me with his immersion blender the last time I tried to eat his mise-en-place.”

 

Malik didn’t bake because his self-restraint and the important ingredients (brown sugar, butter, chocolate chips) often road off into the sunset of a sugar high together before he reached the baking stage, but he was fairly certain one didn’t make cookies with the immersion blender. “Were you even trying to steal cookie dough?”

 

“No.” Bakura got a relatively strange look on his face and said, “It was for vegetable soup.”

 

“What did you try to eat from that?” Actually, what _would_ be edible uncooked in a vegetable soup? ...Malik nearly slapped himself for assuming that edibility mattered to Bakura; nevermind that the man wasn’t a deer — he’d take a chomp out of a whole raw kabocha all the same.

 

“It had _pre-peeled garlic!”_

 

That was—! “Whether the garlic is peeled or not doesn’t make any difference to you!” Malik knew that for a fact; there were things about his partner he’d rather have never known, and that was chief among them. Asking Bakura to _cook_ the garlic only invited the resentful ghost of eternal garlic-breath future to take up permanent and nauseating residence in his home.

 

“That’s only when I don’t want to leave any evidence,” Bakura said, alarmingly reasonable, “I don’t like the skin getting caught between my teeth. Ruins my aesthetic. Besides, the convenience of pre-peeled garlic makes me less inclined to go back to the whole Zorc-summoning thing every single time you drag me to the supermarket.” By his own admission, Bakura, more ancient than Diogenes and infinitely less wise, cared only about the modern world’s pre-peeled garlic.

 

Malik sighed. It was unnecessary to call any single one of his sighs “dramatic,” because that would be akin to calling a punch to the face “aggressive,” fanfiction “written by fans,” or Kaiba “too fucking tall”; honestly, wasn’t being dramatic the entire _point_ of a sigh? “Can we just forget the past minute? Just explain to me how to get my Ka out of the bathroom.” The Revival Jam helped his case for the first time in its fucking existence by moving ominously towards Bakura.

 

“...Get a bucket?” Bakura shrugged. “Diabound listened to my every command right from the start, so I don’t know what you’re doing wrong.”

 

“I’m not doing anything wrong! You’re the one who set the ritual up!” Rightfully, it was Bakura’s fault, even if Malik had been the one to suggest the Ka-summoning ritual in the first place.

 

Bakura scratched the back of his neck, the spectre of his shirt’s tag haunting him still. “Yeah, I don’t know.” He stood up and regarded the Revival Jam as if it were Mokuba and he a wiser kidnapper.

 

“If you want to get any further from the Jam, you’re going to have to summon Diabound,” Malik said, as Bakura scurried along the wall like a naughty tarantula who knows with absolute certainty both that it’s supposed to be in its tank and that its owner has brought their prospective, flighty date home for the first time.

 

“I just need to reach the door; I don’t need to go through the wall,” Bakura said, and he kept his eyes on the Revival Jam.

 

Malik, who should rightfully have nothing to fear from his own Ka, blocked Bakura’s path. Sticking the bathroom’s other two occupants into a “this is our get-along” shirt wasn’t feasible for many reasons; Yugi had tried to get Atem and Kaiba into one of those get-ups, which nearly caused the destruction of Domino City (again…), and Atem and Kaiba were at least both more-or-less humanoid, Kaiba’s recent giraffe ancestor notwithstanding. “Until we figure out what power my Ka grants me, you’re not getting out of this bathroom.”

 

“Not even for—”

 

“No, not even for snack breaks. I’ll bring the snacks here.” Malik affixed Bakura with a glare. “And if you summon Diabound to become Bethesda and escape, I’m going to have words with you later.”

 

“I don’t “become Bethesda”.” Bakura had the same look on his face as when he switched the contents of Atem’s salt and sugar containers in Yugi’s line of sight. “I wouldn’t have done that to The Sims. What kind of person does that to The Sims? I may have been all for plunging the world into unending chaos, but I fully approve of a game that allows you to set your characters on fire.”

 

“You also don’t launch yourself into the sun to fuck with my _Fallout 4_ 100% completion run. It was meant to be a imperfect metaphor.”

Nevermind that Bakura had mixed up EA and Bethesda. Malik wasn't about to press the issue.

 

“See, that’s why I prefer puns: you can’t have an imperfect pun because they’re all perfect,” Bakura said, distracted from impending slimy doom for the time being, though his back was still pressed to the wall. “I would like to launch other people into the sun. Just not myself.”

 

Malik fought to keep any hint of the knowledge that the Revival Jam was creeping slowly but surely towards Bakura’s left ankle off his face. “Regardless of your literary opinions, which you should keep to yourself, we need to figure out what kind of powers I get from my Ka.” He wasn’t sure how the Revival Jam was capable of locomotion, but there was a bump in the direction it moved, a far smoother version of the time Jounouchi had put one of those oblong magnetic toys in a full mini water balloon and used the other magnet in the set to lead it around his apartment.

 

“You’re supposed to learn those through life experience.” Bakura tilted his head. “Though I have a pretty good guess of what yours is. It’s not as... _obviously_ useful as Diabound’s.”

 

Malik had his own suspicions about what powers his Ka granted him (it was _Revival_ Jam), but he wasn’t about to spoil his Ka’s revenge plans by saying anything. In fact, he may have psychically egged it on a teensy bit. Too fast for human eyes to catch, the Revival Jam wrapped around Bakura’s ankle.

 

Startled, but in full possession of his reflexes, Bakura leapt the leap of a cat who had sat upon its owner’s phone without knowing what the strange flat box did, the Revival Jam’s tether stretching with him. He settled into a crouch as he landed in the sink, with his hands gripping the rim and toes the only part of his feet touching the basin.

 

“Stop _growling_ at Jam,” Malik said. There was plenty of slack in the line of slime connecting Bakura and the Jam’s main body. “It doesn’t intend to hurt you.” If the Revival Jam had kept a firm hold on Bakura’s ankle, then it might have been dislocated; Malik knew it wasn’t him who came up with that thought, though it was distinctly Malik-flavored (as opposed to Amir-flavored). It bore a disturbing similarity to the time he reviewed the notes he took while attending a 7:00 AM class after mistaking nighttime cold medicine for daytime cold medicine. Though he was certain it was he who produced those thoughts, he couldn’t recall ever thinking them.

 

“Then what the hell does it want?”

 

“An apology.” Wasn’t that obvious?

 

Bakura remained in the sink and glared at the Revival Jam. “I’m sorry you took offence to me testing the connection between Ka and Ba.”

 

“You know, if you ever want to get out of _my_ bathroom, you have to actually apologize,” Malik said. He wished his notebook was at hand, instead of being blocked by Bakura, the very person he intended to smack. There was, after all, civilized and uncivilized smacking.

 

Before the Revival Jam became dangerous, which only Malik knew would be time independent, Bakura had to act. “Alright. I’m sorry. Acceptable?”

 

The tension (perceptible only by Bakura) drained from the room as the Revival Jam retracted its tentacle and wobbled its way to rest against Malik’s ankle. Having never had his own cat, and thus no resistance to the charms of a small and affectionate predator, Malik bent down to pat the Revival Jam.

 

“Oh, so now you’re taking its side?”

 

Still petting the Jam, Malik looked up at Bakura, blew a stray strand of hair from his mouth, and said,“I’m taking my own side. It’s my Ka, so it’s a part of me — you said as much.” The options of “continuing to pet the Jam” and “cleaning up the mess the ritual made” were, unfortunately, mutually exclusive. He gave the Jam a last few pats, then opened up the cabinet under the sink, pulled out the bottle of vinegar, and set about wiping the chalk from the floor with the mop that typically leaned on the wall between the toilet and the bathtub.

 

So far, the Revival Jam hadn’t shown any interest in absorbing liquids, but he figured it just hadn’t had the option. What could it have done in the short time it existed in the physical plane? Turn on the bathtub? Go into the toilet? Escape into their bedroom and steal their lube? Unbidden, Malik’s brain forced upon him the possibility of the Revival Jam dissolving in bathwater and disappearing down the drain. While he wasn’t certain about the Jam’s solvability, he sure wasn’t about to find out via an unplugged bathtub and the subsequent emergency trip to the sewage treatment plant.

 

As Malik cleaned the floor, the Revival Jam inched toward a spot of vinegar-and-chalk mixture that he had yet to wipe up. It formed another tendril and submerged the tip into the mess. Disoriented by the distant yet distinct impression of shoving his face tongue-first into a block of sour clay, Malik shoved at the Revival Jam with the unwashed end of his mop. The sensation of art class gone culinary remained, and, what’s worse, became hirsute.

 

“No, no, don’t do that,” Malik whined through his hands, as he had let go of the mop to clutch at his mouth. To its credit, the Revival Jam had since bolted away from the mop and was now clinging to the furthest corner of the ceiling. The taste disappeared when the Revival Jam removed the vinegar from its contaminated tendril by secreting it into the now unoccupied sink.

 

Having hopped onto the floor to avoid a faceful of panicked projectile slime monster, Bakura was now the only one in the room who was in any shape to stop this farce. He edged around the mess, picked up the mop, and began to clean, or at least mop up chalk dust to spread it somewhere else (preferably already cleaned). “It’s a sad, sad day when I’m the one cleaning.”

 

Malik watched Bakura push the mess around, then held a hand out for the mop. He got it.

 

After the mop was wrung out and set to dry in the tub, floor now cleaner than before the whole mess of a ritual, Malik said, “Get out. Just...get out.”

 

“Get out of what? The bathroom? The apartment? Your life?”

 

“I don’t even fucking care at this point.” With both great determination and great reluctance, Malik held onto the last vestiges of his mental resistance to collapsing on the floor, staring into the sun through the skylight, and biding his sweet, sweet time until the inevitable heat death of the universe. A part of his own gods-damned soul would not be the end of him.


End file.
